Computing devices of all kinds have made people's lives faster, easier and more inexpensive in some fashion, whether directly or indirectly, for many, many tasks in which people engage in their daily lives. For instance, advancements in software flexibility, processing power and digital storage have made digital cameras commonplace today for their clear benefits over their analog counterparts. While analog cameras still have some advantages to high end photographers, digital cameras have evolved to provide substantially indistinguishable quality for the vast majority of photographs while simultaneously providing many benefits in flexibility.
Digital cameras, for example, enable the recording of a large number of photographs compared to analog cameras. With analog cameras, a user has to buy expensive film limited to a small number of photographs, e.g., 36 photographs, before the film has no more room whereas with digital cameras, in contrast, many photos, e.g., several hundred, may be recorded at a single time. Additionally, the memory of a digital camera is reusable, whereas the user of an analog camera must purchase new film. Other advantages of digital cameras, such as the ability to manipulate images directly in software, also exist over traditional analog cameras. Still further, portable devices of all kinds, including but limited to portable media players, cell phones, PDAs, now include cameras and associated memory, such that the availability of media content recorded by users has mushroomed in recent times.
However, the scalability of tasks that technology advantageously brings sometimes leads to additional problems due to the very scale that the technology itself enabled. Taking the case of digital cameras, instead of taking a few hundred pictures a year which were dutifully placed in physical albums that take up physical space, now thousands, if not tens of thousands, of photos can easily be taken by an avid user of various devices having digital camera capabilities in a single year. A user cannot expect to develop each one of these photos into a physical copy because the amount of time that would be taken and eventually the amount of 3-D space taken up by the albums would be limiting.
To address this issue, currently, each time a user runs out of room in memory of a digital camera for additional digital photographs, or at any time, the user can transfer the contents of the memory of the digital camera to another computing device, such as a personal computer (PC), gaming system, laptop, handheld device, etc., where the photos can be stored according to the file system of the device (e.g., in folders, in a database, etc.), further manipulated, displayed as a slideshow, or otherwise acted upon by the device. The user may also upload the photos from this other computing device, to the extent it is connected to a wide area network, such as the Internet, to a server hosting a media storage and display service that is communicatively coupled to such wide area network, at which point the user may share such folders to any friends, family, or other third parties who have access to the wide area network.
However, this process is not a good solution to the problem of scale that digital cameras have introduced for several reasons. For one, the process is more complex from a technological standpoint than many users are equipped to handle. This is true for both offloading media from a portable device, such as a camera, to a transferee computing device and for uploading the content from the transferee computing device to a server. For instance, the offloading task may involve understanding the mode in which the camera needs to be, possessing an appropriate cable and corresponding understanding of where the interfaces of the cable are received by the transferor portable device and transferee computing device in order to achieve a proper download, and finally an understanding of software on the transferee computing device, which may require a pre-configuration to be able to connect to the particular transferor portable device, that is not always entirely intuitive to a computer novice in order to initiate the offload. The uploading task can also be challenging to achieve for an infrequent user of a computer. For instance, it requires navigation and log-in to a web site, sometimes requires a download of extra software to work, and requires the user, at a minimum, to have an understanding of how to find the data on the computer.
Additionally, these steps take significant time away from the user when the user could be performing more important tasks. An offload of a hundred still images from a camera, for instance, may require five to ten minutes, or more, to complete. Depending on the connection to the Internet, an upload to a server of a hundred still images may take even longer. In short, once a user has completed the task of creating media content, the user should be freed from the current pain caused by administration and overhead surrounding access to such media content.
Moreover, due to the sheer number of photos, videos, audio clips, songs, and the like that a user may store on a computer in different locations and folders, personal data management and search has grown out of control. Due to the scale of the problem, much like finding a needle in a haystack, it may be very difficult for a user to find a particular media item in his or her personal data store. While some file systems and services allow a user to manually enter and attach metadata to a media item, again due to scale, adding metadata per media item is more trouble to the user than it is worth.
Accordingly, for these and other reasons, improved methods for transmitting personal data, such as media content including video, images and audio files, among computing devices, and for automatically assigning metadata to the personal data are desired.